If I’m being honest, I have gotten really comfortable in this temporary home of mine. Although it is not perfect, the Lord has blessed me with a fairly comfortable life. So much so, that I too quickly fall in love with life rather than the One who has allowed me to have it.

Do you really need me to tell you for the thousandth time a spiritual idea? We’re drowning in spiritual content but starving for transformation. We don’t need more words. We need honesty. And we need to do the work. So let’s try something different today.

Have you ever felt like you were walking a tightrope between trusting God and clinging to something else? You believe in Jesus, but when life presses in, your trust is tested, and you realize you’ve placed your hope in something other than Him. Maybe it’s security, success, relationships, or comfort. You say you love God, but your heart is pulled in different directions.

Here’s the deal: what’s true is already true, and God already knows it. If it’s true that you struggle with the sin of anger, that is already true, and not being honest with God or yourself about it only deepens and/or prolongs the struggle. No believer really wants to continue in sin, and yet we often fail to be honest about our sin and take the steps to kill it. 

Jesus did not come only to bring individuals to Himself. He came for a people. A collective bride. A family. This can be difficult for us in our highly individualistic society to truly grasp. Most of us live as if our religious experiences, our beliefs, and our lives in God are our own and have little to do with the community around us. But God intended that his church be a people who live life together, and a people who gather.

What if it hasn’t been our learning that is to blame, but the teaching? I don’t mean that we have had poor teachers in the classroom, necessarily.  I mean, what if we have been lacking some of the most important parts of learning…

When we become followers of Jesus, by repenting of our sin, acknowledging Christ as Lord of our lives, believing and trusting in all that he has done for us, we become new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). This means that our past failures, successes, and even the ways we once defined ourselves - including our work - are reinterpreted in light of the redemption offered by Christ.

When the Scripture talks about fellowship (Greek koinonia), it is not talking about a social club among people who simply meet in a common location, talk about some common interests, and share laughs. Our fellowship is rooted in our common Father, our shared Savior and Lord Jesus, and the One Spirit who abides in us. If we pursue biblical fellowship, we won’t look like the world. 

He invites us today, through faith in Christ and by the Holy Spirit, to live the day with Him. In fact, He wants this sweet fellowship with us. God went to the greatest lengths for us to live this day in His presence.

Remember, discipleship is for every person. And helping others live in light of the gospel doesn’t require a curriculum - it only requires our own personal love for Jesus, dependence on God’s work in people’s lives, and a little bit of practical forethought.

Forgetfulness happens daily; it happens to you and me when we sin. The truth is that in those moments we are forgetting the truth of the gospel. And when we forget, because it’s going to happen, who do we have around us to see us through?

Before I realized it, Lance was showing me how to be a man who pursued God in every aspect of life. He wasn’t just pouring into me when it came to my theological growth but allowed me to see every aspect of his life so that I could get a glimpse of what it meant and looked like to follow Jesus in an authentic way.